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“Good Luck with That” Public License
- tener 8y agoThis: > 0. You just DO WHAT THE F*CK YOU WANT TO as long as you NEVER LEAVE A TRACE TO TRACK THE AUTHOR of the original product. may be in fact quite tricky to ensure: unless you do an (potentially expensive) audit of the code and all potential binary assets within you will never be sure. To see how difficult it is to erase all traces: see how the state-backed hacking groups keep getting traced. EDIT: Why the downvotes? Yeah I know this is a joke license, but to a lawyer no license is a joke, and to use something in a corporate environment you really need to have one on board.
- evilduck 8y agoSo if you want to use the GLWT license, good luck with that?
- imtringued 8y ago"Copyright (c) [year] [fullname]" I don't think it's possible to comply with this license because the license text itself will already contain enough information to track the author.
- lucb1e 8y agoNobody said you had to leave it in there. In fact, it explicitly states you have to get it out of there.
- Someone1234 8y agoMaybe the license needs a license so we know how we're allowed to use it.
- bunderbunder 8y ago> Yeah I know this is a joke license, but to a lawyer no license is a joke, and to use something in a corporate environment you really need to have one on board. For the kind of projects this license is ostensibly meant for, I think that it's most resonable to regard "no sensible lawyer would ever OK this" as a feature rather than a bug.
- stephengillie 8y agoWhen I wrote this, only God and I understood what I was doing Now, only God knows This looks great for hobby projects; probably better than my "IDGAF" license. (Obligatory IANAL)
- thefifthsetpin 8y ago> IANAL Yeah, we figured that out when you said that this looks great for some projects. ;-)
- Toorkit 8y agoSimilarly permissive license: http://www.wtfpl.net/ http://www.wtfpl.net/
- miguelrochefort 8y agoMore permissive, as it doesn't force you to "NEVER LEAVE A TRACE TO TRACK THE AUTHOR of the original product".
- eboyjr 8y agoI am not a lawyer, but many may feel more comfortable if it included something like the following about having no implied warranties: > THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. Also, how can users "NEVER LEAVE A TRACE TO TRACK THE AUTHOR of the original product" if the author's full name and date of creation is meant to be included in the license?
- lucb1e 8y ago> how can users "NEVER LEAVE A TRACE TO TRACK THE AUTHOR of the original product" if the author's full name and date of creation is meant to be included in the license? By changing the license file.
- eboyjr 8y agoMaybe it should be more explicit: > No person shall, without the authority of the copyright owner or the law intentionally remove or alter any copyright management information. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1202 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1202
- lolc 8y ago> F*CK Either you say fuck or you don't.
- rectang 8y agoThere's a long tradition of licenses with a rebellious spirit, either deliberately or incidentally drafted in such a way that makes them hard to interpret. Before this "GLWTPL" there was the WTFPL, the JSON license, etc. People who choose such a license should be aware that they are making downstream adoption of their product more difficult. (For some authors that is surely the point.)
- pattisapu 8y agoHow does do-whatever-you-want make adoption more difficult?
- oconnor663 8y agoSerious answer: Most companies big enough to care about this sort of thing have a list of approved open source licenses, which their lawyers have read and decided they're ok with. Using a license not on that list means you need to talk to the lawyers. That usually takes a few days of back and forth emails.
- greglindahl 8y agoAs an example, WTFPL is on IBM's list of acceptable open-source licenses.
- lozenge 8y agoIf the license isn't on a pre-approved list I have to send it to the in house legal team. Good Luck With That!!
- rectang 8y agoComplying with the letter of an ambiguously drafted license is quite challenging, but it's important if you are an entity with a lot of assets and thus a plump target for a lawsuit. The JSON license has made a lot of lawyers a lot of money.
- gowld 8y agoThe licenses aren't "do-whatever-you-want". They have jokes in them that are legally confounding.
- _ph_ 8y agoAnother joke license... somewhat funny, but I dearly hope, no one considers using it for any code. If you think, your code should be thrown away, please don't spam hosts like Github with it. But if you don't want to throw away your code, and in my experience, most code has a value, then please publish it under one of the well-known licenses. I think it is one of the great features of Github, that on creation of a repository, it offers you to attach one of the well-known licenses to your project. This ensures that your code can be used without creating legal pitfalls and does not get lost.
- BFatts 8y agoExactly... These licenses only serve to make open source management more difficult. There are plenty of licenses that are already great at making your code open, and that are already accepted across the landscape. Stop making new, stupid licenses. https://www.opensource.org https://www.opensource.org Plenty of good licenses there.
- baud147258 8y ago> [Github] offers you to attach one of the well-known licenses to your project Is this recent? I can't remember being able to do it last time I created a project, which was a few years ago.
- gowld 8y agohttps://help.github.com/articles/licensing-a-repository/ https://help.github.com/articles/licensing-a-repository/
- Someone1234 8y ago> please don't spam hosts like Github with it Huh? A GitHub repository is akin to a personal website. Why shouldn't people put their personal doodles, experiments, and silliness on it?
- _ph_ 8y agoIf you pay for your web site, feel free to do what like. With places like Github, things become a bit more complex. First of all, I assume you are not paying for those repositories. So I think it is decent to not randomly waste such a free offer. It also makes it more difficult to search for serious projects, if it is full of spam. On the other side, in my experience, there is almost no code, which is so silly that it is useless. Quite the contrary, a lot of my best code pieces started with some sillines. It is sad, if code, which the creator made the effor to upload, is wasted, because of a poor license choices.
- shmerl 8y agoDoes no attribution requirement make it non free?
- nwsm 8y agoThe meme about writing bad code is annoying
- BFatts 8y agoAnother silly license just to include the word "f*ck". These are pointless and only server to confuse open source development. These are so much more appropriate for the FSF because of their intent with software.
- srirachafari 8y agoSeeing that you took the entire joke from u/disintegore, you should maybe attribute them somewhere.
- thefifthsetpin 8y agoI'm not sure if you meant he took the license itself or the joke in the readme. If the license, then he was requested to remove attribution. If the quote, then I'd like to know how Karl Weierstrass managed to snag the username disintegore more than a century before the introduction of the site.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- samber 8y agoI have to many github repositories that would need such a license !!
- tzs 8y agoOT: has anyone tried licensing a program as a whole using a different license than the individual components of the program? If I ever release something that is large, I've considered licensing each function and class separately using a BSD license, but licensing the program as a whole as a compilation using a GPL license. The idea is that if someone wants to just take a handful of useful things from my program, such as my configuration file parser, a sales/VAT tax calculation routine that supports the rounding modes of several jurisdictions, or things like that, they can do so regardless of how they are licensing their code. They can have the relatively low level building blocks. If they are building something that fills the same niche as my program, however, they have to be careful. For example, if we are both doing word processors and they take my whole text processing engine (which consists of dozens of individual components), then they really need to think twice if their program is not GPL. Even though every function they have taken is available under BSD, they have also taken the selection and arrangement of the functions, which is covered by my compilation copyright.
- ballenf 8y agoDepends on local laws. In the US, it's very tough to protect compilations of otherwise public facts. The real answer, however, is that if you had the funds and it made good financial sense to challenge and pursue them, your whole perspective on the affair would change. Litigating such a messy case would be very, very expensive (again, in the US at least). One goal in licensing is to think about "how do I make violations clearcut and cheaper to enforce?" Your approach might require proving how they compiled their code together -- i.e., was it just coincidence that the two ended up looking similar? What if they coded their own VAT tax code but used every other piece of your code? Would that be enough to get around the GPL license? Just a couple examples of why such litigation would be so complex and expensive. You generally don't want to have to get into motives and process -- if you can't look at the two codebases and decide the case, it will be messy. I'd just keep more of your code proprietary and only permissively license the stuff with very broad appeal.